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Last Updated on July 3, 2019 by Work In My Pajamas
It is easy to find advice on what to do with your business card. We’ll focus instead on common business cards creative types make that they should avoid at all costs. Avoid these mistakes, and you’ll stand out from the crowd.
A Design That Looks Like Everyone Else’s Business Card
A common mistake creative types make with business cards is creating one that looks like everyone else’s business card. It is the photographer who hands out a business card with a cookie cutter camera outline on it. It is the painter who has a simple image of a canvas with a basic landscape as their logo. This is a mistake for several reasons. The first is that it fails to advertise your creativity or distinguishing traits. The second is that the business card will be lost in the pile, reducing the odds you’ll convert the customer.
Having Cheap Business Cards
Business cards templates can create great business cards if you use the right images, logos and fonts. However, the quality of the material and the print job itself will determine the first impression the business card has. A beautiful design on cheap paper will be counterproductive. A business card on solid matte paper or thick textured paper will stand out both for its quality and other attributes. A side benefit of having high quality business cards is that they’ll last a long time. This means that the family whose wedding you did two years ago may still have an attractive business card to pass on to someone else. A cheap business card that gets crumpled up in their pocket won’t last long enough to be passed on to the next prospect
Missing Contact Information
Creative types are actually more prone to this than the average person. They’re so busy coming up with a beautiful image or the complex artistic whole encapsulated in the business card that including critical contact information is forgotten. Before you spend two hours polishing off the business card design, make certain it contains essential business contact information. This includes your business name, personal name, job title or the type of photography you do (unless the business card makes this incredibly obvious), business website phone number, and email address. The business address is necessary if people come to your studio, but it is
less important if you only go to them. Social media handles are useful but not essential.
Not Paying Attention to the Details
Mistakes like leaving out the area code for the phone number and zip code for the address can create problems and lead to others questioning your ability to pay attention to the details. Putting old information on business cards, though, will lead to them being tossed in the trash when they potential client can’t get a hold of you.
Not Having Professional Information to Put on the Business Card
A lot of small business owners make this mistake. It is the email address or social media handle that was cute in high school but now makes you look immature. It is having a PO box as your business address instead of a “real” one. Conversely, having a consistent, branded set of social media profiles that match your email address is a plus.
